Adam Bede eBook

The place fitted up that day as a court of justice
was a grand old hall, now destroyed by fire.
The midday light that fell on the close pavement of
human heads was shed through a line of high pointed
windows, variegated with the mellow tints of old painted
glass. Grim dusty armour hung in high relief
in front of the dark oaken gallery at the farther
end, and under the broad arch of the great mullioned
window opposite was spread a curtain of old tapestry,
covered with dim melancholy figures, like a dozing
indistinct dream of the past. It was a place that
through the rest of the year was haunted with the
shadowy memories of old kings and queens, unhappy,
discrowned, imprisoned; but to-day all those shadows
had fled, and not a soul in the vast hall felt the
presence of any but a living sorrow, which was quivering
in warm hearts.

But that sorrow seemed to have made it itself feebly
felt hitherto, now when Adam Bede’s tall figure
was suddenly seen being ushered to the side of the
prisoner’s dock. In the broad sunlight of
the great hall, among the sleek shaven faces of other
men, the marks of suffering in his face were startling
even to Mr. Irwine, who had last seen him in the dim
light of his small room; and the neighbours from Hayslope
who were present, and who told Hetty Sorrel’s
story by their firesides in their old age, never forgot
to say how it moved them when Adam Bede, poor fellow,
taller by the head than most of the people round him,
came into court and took his place by her side.

But Hetty did not see him. She was standing in
the same position Bartle Massey had described, her
hands crossed over each other and her eyes fixed on
them. Adam had not dared to look at her in the
first moments, but at last, when the attention of
the court was withdrawn by the proceedings he turned
his face towards her with a resolution not to shrink.

Why did they say she was so changed? In the corpse
we love, it is the likeness we see—­it is
the likeness, which makes itself felt the more keenly
because something else was and is not. There they
were—­the sweet face and neck, with the
dark tendrils of hair, the long dark lashes, the rounded
cheek and the pouting lips—­pale and thin,
yes, but like Hetty, and only Hetty. Others thought
she looked as if some demon had cast a blighting glance
upon her, withered up the woman’s soul in her,
and left only a hard despairing obstinacy. But
the mother’s yearning, that completest type
of the life in another life which is the essence of
real human love, feels the presence of the cherished
child even in the debased, degraded man; and to Adam,
this pale, hard-looking culprit was the Hetty who
had smiled at him in the garden under the apple-tree
boughs—­she was that Hetty’s corpse,
which he had trembled to look at the first time, and
then was unwilling to turn away his eyes from.